🎯Burr Alignment; 🔬Electron Microscopes;

Views and news about the brews. Unique and relevant information for coffee professionals and enthusiasts.

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Burr Alignment Tool: Not Necessary

🎯 I’ve been playing around with burrs quite a lot recently for some new projects. I can’t tell you about the projects, but I can share what I’ve learnt about alignment.

Remember that alignment tool I was developing? Turns out what it does (radial alignment) is way, way less important than the burrs being parallel.

This is excellent news because 1) you don’t need an expensive alignment tool and 2) parallel alignment is actually really easy!

Mat North from Full Court Press posted a photo series for Mythos burr alignment on the BH Facebook group. It works the same for all flat burrs.

If you ask really nicely I’ll do one for the EK43 as well.

Electron Microscopy of Coffee Grinds

🔬 This might be my favourite post of all time on the various BH platforms.

Grigori Beridze has access to an electron microscope, so he ground the same coffee at an espresso setting on both an EK43 and a Robur, covered the grinds in 50 nanometers of gold (for reflectivity), and got to work.

The results are kind of mesmerising. The level of detail is insane. Please send Grigori thanks for his hard work!

While browsing through:

take note of the scale on each slide (10um = 1/100th of a millimetre).

think about just how difficult it is for water to penetrate the large grounds’ maze of cellulose, extract the flavour right in the middle, and get back out into the brew…

compared to how much surface area there is on the small and large grinds that gets extracted straight away.